THE REASON

chapter thirty ; positive
[ season six – episode five }

   SHE SLOWLY BEGAN to regain the consciousness she had lost. Yet it was rather strange to have those senses return to her. She expected to hear the group she was with plan out what they had to do to return to Alexandria, yet she heard nothing.

It was as quiet as the backroads would be at the dead of night — back when the world was normal, obviously. The air was peaceful and so were the limbs in her body. At first, she thought she was dead. Maybe her body had finally given up on her. For the first time in weeks or months or even years she felt not a single inch of pain throughout her entire body.

Both mentally and physically she couldn't feel anything negative, only positive. She couldn't describe it at first. She had forgotten everything she cared for along with the way the world worked, and she truly thought that she had woken up in the afterlife. She deserved it. She deserved the peace and quiet.

Inconspicuously, her brows edged downward. She thought she was numb until she made the certain motion. She could smell the rich, bitter aroma of coffee. Something wasn't right. It felt like only a few minutes before that she had... she couldn't remember.

Now she was desperate to open her eyes. She wanted to know what the hell was going on. But she couldn't find the heart to. She was peaceful and she had not a single care in the world.

Who was she?

She didn't remember feeling anything like this...

What's going on?

She needed to wake up. Her friends were possibly in danger. They were running from the herd. Something at her home was wrong. All of her family were in danger.

And so she did. Her eyelids slowly lifted up, expecting to see a ceiling to an abandoned building after realizing she was on something soft. A mattress. At first everything was a blur, but as she blinked more frequently the more she noticed that she recognized the ceiling above her.

"Oh my God," someone gasped from beside her, resulting in her survival instincts kicking in. Her neck snapped over to the side, frowning intensely. Her muscles relaxed as she took in the features of the person. Isabelle? Wait... the infirmary. "She's up, Ro!" she beamed, rising to her feet and called over to one of the other people in the room.

Footsteps sounded from the other side of the room, causing Kloe to snap her neck the opposite direction. The particular Hispanic woman Isabelle had called to had a wide smile on her face as she held onto a mug of hot coffee. "Thank God. We were worried you weren't going to wake up for at least a day. You were extremely exhausted, Klo."

"W-what?" Kloe stammered, her voice cracking from underuse. "How— how am I here?" She propped herself up by using her elbows to hold her up, not flinching in the slightest since she was in no pain whatsoever. There was no need aside from the fatigue to pass out.

"It's okay, Kloe," Isabelle assured, offering her friend a smile. "You made it back. You all did... well, they should be soon—" Rosita whacked the woman's arm with the back of her hand. "Oh, right. Everything's okay. Michonne told us what happened."

"Can— can you tell me what exactly happened? The last thing I remember was I fell forward onto Michonne... tell her I'm sorry for that," Kloe cleared her throat, her cheeks flushing red from embarrassment.

Rosita took a seat beside Kloe's bed in the infirmary and slowly smiled. "After you fainted, Glenn set you down in a pet store in the town you were in. Walkers were surrounding you, there was no other choice but to wait for a short while. Michonne told us that you were in-and-out, you probably wouldn't remember any of that. She said you were terrified and you kept asking what was wrong. You knew something was wrong with you. No one had answers but Glenn was there comforting you, and you remained calm until you would faint again. Then the herd appeared. Long story short, they all ran. They ran all the way here and that's when we found you in Zayn's arms completely gone."

Kloe felt strange. She didn't remember waking up at all. It felt as if she'd been asleep for a long time. She felt out of it. "Well... what is wrong?"

Silence lapped between the three as Rosita bit down onto her lip, yet Isabelle frowned. She was confused — she thought everything was okay. "Wait, there's something wrong?"

"No, no. There's nothing wrong, Isa," Rosita told the other assistant. She cleared her throat as she rose to her feet, locking eyes with Isabelle. "Can I talk to Kloe alone for a minute? It won't take long, I just gotta tell her something, okay?"

Isabelle's lips parted from shock, her eyes dropping down to her friend on the bed. After a few moments, she hesitantly but quickly nodded, brushing some baby hairs that fell out of her ponytail behind her ear. She didn't think twice to walk over to the door, exiting the infirmary.

"What's going on?" Kloe asked almost immediately the moment Isabelle shut the door behind her, her brows anxiously brushing together. Rosita licked her lips, her eyes flickering to the ground as she retook her seat beside the bed. There was silence for a moment or two, an uncomfortable feeling settling within the midst of her stomach. "Rosita, what's wrong with me?"

"Nothing, Kloe," Rosita answered truthfully, lifting her eyes to meet her friend's. "Nothing is wrong with you. It's just— something is not normal. I've been sitting here for the past few hours since you got back, thinking. I've been connecting the pieces, and you should be too."

"I'm not a doctor," Kloe whispered, rubbing her own hand with her thumb to relieve her nerves. It didn't work. "What do you mean by connecting the pieces?"

"Kloe, I know you're not stupid. You know what I mean," Rosita replied. She lifted her hand as she began listing things with her fingers. "The continuous vomiting, dizziness, hunger, exhaustion and possibly more that I don't know about. Your 'illness' that you self-diagnosed yourself with nearly a week ago shouldn't still be here."

The Rhee woman dipped her head, frowning her brows as she tried to figure out what Rosita was trying to say to her. She started feeling dumb. She never got this confused — she always had answers for her problems, but now, it was like there wasn't a direct answer to any of it. She felt like it was deep down, but she couldn't pull it out of the deepest depths in her brain.

"I think you should do a pregnancy test, Klo."

Her heart fell into the lowest part of her stomach, her head snapping up as her eyes widened with surprise and horror. "W-what?"

"You don't have to if you don't want to, but I think it's for the better," Rosita added, offering her friend a kind, warm smile. "If it's negative then we'll have to look deeper as to why you're sick, but I highly believe it won't be." She pulled something out of her pocket.

Kloe didn't even have to look to know what the item was. She was in shock, her mind never even traveling that far to assume that she was possibly pregnant. The more she thought about it, the more she slowly began to realize. It all made sense. Now even she herself highly believed it wouldn't be negative.

"Give me it."

...

She did it. She took the test and she desperately wanted to see the results, yet she couldn't. Rosita had told her that Glenn, Nicholas and Jayce were still out there, but it felt as if she was hiding something. She didn't say anything.

The couch in the house she was so used to being inside of felt uncomfortable for the first time ever. She was trying to process the thought of possibly being something she could never have imagined herself being. And the worst part about it was that she had no idea if Glenn was still mad at her or not.

Glenn.

She couldn't even glance at the test in her pocket until she was with him. He needed to see it at the same time she did. She wanted to look at it and wrap her arms around him so tightly as tears poured out of their eyes with happiness. They were somewhere safe, for now. Then it occurred to her she didn't even have the slightest idea what had happened that day.

Why did they set off a horn?

That question made Kloe forget about everything as she rose to her feet, not thinking twice to step toward the door. She walked out into the cool Spring air, wrapping her arms around her chest as she closed the door behind her. Everything looked normal — the same.

She had switched outfits, since she took the pregnancy test — grimacing every time she smelt the dirtiness radiating off her clothes. She was now clad in a pair of jeans, a white tank top and a thin gray cardigan that stopped at her thighs.

The sun was still high in the sky. It was mid-afternoon. The same day after everything had happened. Time was going slow...

Coincidentally, Zayn happened to practically bump into his younger sister. "Oh my God, you're awake?" he whispered almost instantly, his eyes wide like saucers as he stared at her. She forced a tight-lipped smile and nodded, causing him to wrap his arms around her. "Thank God. You scared the shit out of me passing out like that. Don't ever do that again."

He pulled away from the embrace, keeping his hand on her shoulder. She didn't speak — she couldn't. Although when the thought of the particular item in her pocket plagued her mind once more, she felt the need to. "Where's Glenn?"

"He's not back yet," Zayn responded.

"But we've been back for a few hours?"

"Two."

Kloe's face fell. "They could be in trouble. They're only twenty minutes away from here, it shouldn't take them this long to get back," Kloe reasoned, extending out her hand as she reasoned with her brother.

Zayn relinquished his hand from her shoulder, inhaling deeply. "I'm sure they're fine, Klo. Jayce wouldn't let anything happen to Mr. Romeo. He's still keen on the 'Rhees being immortal' shit. Glenn's fine. Trust me. They probably just got held up somewhere or maybe Nicholas did something stupid again and got himself hurt. Glenn said it would happen one of these days."

"Just because I've had a rough day, I'm gonna believe you for now," Kloe sighed as she walked past him. He spun around and joined her side. "If they're not back in the next hour, I'll most definitely be going out to find them." He opened his mouth to argue, yet she stopped him with a raise of a finger. "I don't need your disagreements, Zayn. I'm capable."

Zayn paused for a few seconds before speaking his mind. "Well, I was gonna say I would come with you, but okay," he shrugged. The pair began to walk to nowhere in particular and decided to simply stroll along and talk. "So much shit went down while we were gone, Klo."

"I was gonna ask someone about that," she perked up, more alert as she scanned the area around her. Her eyes squinted as she caught onto some blood splatters on the ground to the side of her. "What the hell happened here? I'm assuming we're fine now considering I'm not tied to a chair and getting tortured."

"Yeah," he chuckled, "we're fine now. Maggie explained everything to me. Alexandria got invaded—"

"What?!"

"Right! I had the same reaction," he agreed. "Aside from all the corpses on the side of the road like a mass murder has happened, it seems like nothing has happened at all. But that's not the case. Some people called the Wolves invaded us. They crashed a truck into that tower over there, which set off the horn. Deanna and Spencer were the ones that turned it off. Carol, being the badass that she is, disguised herself as one of them and took them down one-by-one."

"How the hell did she disguise herself?"

"Drew a 'W' on her forehead."

"What?"

"The 'W' stands for Wolves, Klo. Catch up," he rolled his eyes teasingly, earning a slap to the arm. "But it's all fine now, I hope. Now we just gotta wait for the others to return and then everything will be fine."

Before Kloe could say any more, a screech from ahead of her and her brother sounded loudly. They both snapped their heads into the direction it came from. The gate. Her eyes filled with hope as she expected to spot her husband and Jayce and Nicholas to all come through perfectly unharmed.

She jogged forward along with Zayn, a few others from Alexandria arriving too. A small smile etched onto her lips as she spotted Jayce first, only a few scratches on his face were to be seen. To the left of her, she spotted Maggie at the scene. Then the others that were on the supply run were to be seen. And more and more and more.

As Kloe came to a stop, her smile faltered ever so slightly as Jayce stepped into the gate that Max had opened for him. Her eyes darted to the sides of Jayce, seeing no one else with him. He was all alone.

And since she was closer, her face practically fell to the floor with shock as she took in the man's facial expression. His eyes were brimmed with tears and were bloodshot. It was like he was staring at the ground as if it weren't even there to begin with. His black hair dripped with sweat, the liquid running down his forehead and mixed with the blood on his face.

He looked... traumatized.

Breathing heavily, he stood dead still as the gate closed behind him. The atmosphere had gone from bright, joyous and calm to dark, gloomy and tense in the matter of a single moment. Kloe's lungs felt as if they filled with water, holding her breath for too long as she watched Jayce.

He didn't realize there were so many people around him, waiting. He had to fight the jelly like feeling in his knees to not crash to the ground. After what he had just witnessed an hour before— an hour... it should've taken him only at least twenty minutes to make it home, but he figured that perhaps he was walking very slowly as he tried to process what he saw.

The sound of a certain voice snapped him out of whatever he was experiencing inside of his head as he snapped it over to the direction where Maggie was. She had the pure look of concern on her expression as she approached him. She cupped his face and wiped away some of the sweat off his face with her thumb.

He stared into her eyes for a few seconds, holding back the tears that threatened to fall. Maggie glanced down at his hands, her eyes widening at the trembling they withheld. Her eyes snapped back up to his as she reached down for them.

More footsteps were to be heard behind Maggie, making him peer over her shoulder. He wished he didn't. Just seeing her face made him want to start bawling. His heart beated more harshly. He was glad to see her up and walking and not as exhausted as earlier that day, but after what he had seen—

"Jayce? What's wrong?" Maggie wondered, drawing back his attention away from Kloe, whose face was innocent and shocked and scared and caring. "Where's Glenn and Nicholas?"

His eyes immediately dashed back to Kloe at the sound of Glenn's name and that was it. His bottom lip trembled as tears spilled out of his sockets. His face creased up, and he sniffed as he shook his head. He mentally slapped himself for crying in front of everyone, but he couldn't help it.

He told himself repeatedly to step up and not to be a pathetic little boy who cried. That's what he told himself. He pulled himself together as he swiped away his tears, his bottom lip still shaking ever so slightly. He slipped out of Maggie's grip and walked up to Kloe slowly.

Maggie followed, confused as to what her boyfriend was so upset about.

"I—" Jayce went to speak as he stopped two meters away from Kloe Rhee, but his throat was so closed up from the lump it seemed as though his voice was a squeak. He tried again. "I'm sorry..."

Now everyone that was on the supply run had surrounded them all. Zayn stood beside his sister, his hand on her shoulder as he stared at Jayce. Michonne, Max, Madolyn and Heath were also there.

"We were with you guys," Jayce continued, not daring to tear his eyes away from the woman who would not blink in front of him. "We were— we got split off from you all. But our— Glenn's plan was to light a fire, and that it would lead them away from here. We tried— but it was too late. Nicholas began to get scared, terrified even. I— I jumped up onto something connected to a building and I managed to get up onto the roof. I thought... I thought they were following me. That they were behind me. But when I looked down from the roof, I saw that they were both on a..." he paused, wiping away another tear that slithered down his cheek.

"They had both gotten onto a dumpster, and they were surrounded with the herd that had split off from the large one on the road. I screamed at the walkers to get away from them... but it was like I wasn't even there." His eyes seemed to have looked down at the ground, but the moment he realized, he lifted his eyes instantaneously. "I tried, Kloe... I really did. Nicholas shot himself and he fell down into the herd...

"Pulling Glenn down with him."

Kloe was frozen, her eyes wider than they ever had been before. She didn't react to the awful, horrid pain in her chest which she was sure came from her heart. Her lips were parted from shock, and now her hands were shaking just as much as Jayce's were when he first stepped through the gate.

"I— I didn't see what happened after... I just saw Nicholas get torn to shreds on top of Glenn. I had to not watch... and I fled."

Kloe felt as if the wind was knocked out of her. It was as if someone had pulled out her heart and squeezed it so hard that it became mush. Her heart shattered. She was certain she hadn't blinked since Jayce first entered. She didn't know it, but several tears poured out of her eyes. Even within a matter of seconds she was in a worse state than ever.

"No..." she whispered, her voice shaking. "No, you're lying. Tell me you're lying!" She cried, her face scrunching up as she silently cried. It was so bad that she couldn't even make a sound except from the gasping for breath. "Jayce, tell me you're lying! Tell me!" she weakly pushed her hand onto the man's chest, his head hung low from shame as tears of his own spilled. "Tell me he's not dead, Jayce! Please..."

Her voice lowered as it rocked even more from emotion. She gave him another push, yet he remained still and didn't even budge. She was weak, and she felt it as every millisecond passed. Her hand covered her mouth as a manifold of salty tears ran down her cheeks like a waterfall. "I can't— I can't handle it. Please, Jayce!"

She let out a voice breaking, desperate, overwhelmed cry as her knees began to wobble. Someone wrapped their hands around her arms before she could fall. Rosita. She had no one to help from their injuries and neither did Isabelle, so they were both there and witnessed everything.

She didn't know when, but Rosita had led her back to her house at one point after finding out that her husband would not be returning to Alexandria ever again and that she would never even see him again.

No one had ever seen Kloe as broken as she was just then. The words that left Jayce's mouth sucked the life out of her. Usually she would've thought that maybe there was a chance that he was still alive out there, yet actually hearing that someone saw him go down and witnessed everything, she couldn't be like that.

She didn't know what to think anymore.

...

The hysterical crying stage of Kloe's grief subsided fairly quickly as she gripped tightly onto the pregnancy test without seeing it. She didn't want to look at it. She didn't appreciate the thought of raising a child all by herself. It terrified her.

Although, Rosita was beside her the entire time. She was there for her, and that was something that she was happy for. Rosita knew that Kloe couldn't find out if she was indeed carrying a child all alone, so she was by her side the whole time. She promised Kloe she wouldn't leave her side ever.

Kloe only stared into the air, not a single speck of emotion on her face except the dancing waves of grief in her eyes. She didn't feel whole anymore. Even when Glenn was mad at her, she was still grateful he was still here, and she knew he still cared about her. He still loved her.

Having that feeling ripped away from her was the equivalent to ripping away her life, leaving nothing but a small part of her brain to remind her to breathe, cry, stare.

A hand on her arm broke her out of her state, or so she thought. She never budged, but the thoughts in her head dispersed. She slowly turned her head and caught the eyes of her closest friend. "I'm right here," she soothed, rubbing circles on Kloe's arm.

That's when she realized that she had probably been sitting completely still for at least ten minutes with the test gripped in her hand. She blinked, again and again and again. She had to do this. She couldn't sit there and do nothing. She sucked in a deep breath.

She counted down from three in her head and pinched the ends of the test. She bit down on her tongue and flipped it hastily. Her eyes scanned over the sign on the test, leaning forward to get a better look.

A few shouts came from outside of the house, snapping both her and Rosita's attention away from the item in Kloe's hand. Rosita wrapped an arm around Kloe's shoulder. "Don't worry about that right now. We'll see in a second. You have to know, Kloe. This is important."

And with that, she looked back down at the test and squinted her eyes.

Her lips parted with surprise, her eyes broadening with horror. Her brows lifted as her nose burnt, sending tears into her eyes as she stared at the positive pregnancy test in front of her.

She dropped her hands in her lap as she stared into the air, the world around her fading away. At least, she was for a few moments before more shouts echoed from outside.

Rosita seemed like she had also seen the test result the same time Kloe did and was comforting Kloe in any possible way she could. The shouts from outside stopped them both however. They both shared a glance, and although the fact that Kloe was still in a state of shock, she simply shoved the test back into her pocket and rose to her feet.

She had something to live for. She had to fight.

That's what she told herself at least, yet it didn't change anything. She still wanted to crawl into the corner of the room and sit there for as long as humanly possible.

She didn't want to eat. She didn't want to sleep. She didn't want to drink. She didn't want to do anything anymore.

But now she had to.

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words: 4093
27th december 2023
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uhhh so- thoughts? :D

HOPE YOU ALL HAD AN AMAZING CHRISTMAS!